Galleries R Us (2018)
By
Preston Street Union
Pete Kingston 'Marshmallow Towers' - five-minute residency with Preston Street Union's Galleries R Us. Photo credit: Jonathan Price.
Galleries R Us was a modular, itinerant art space developed, curated and worn by Preston Street Union (PSU).
Presented during Art Week Exeter 2018, this roaming art space appeared briefly at public sites in Exeter including the bus station, the high street, the quayside and a building site, then dispersed again into the surrounding crowds.
The gallery's programme was built around a series of five-minute residencies by commissioned artists, as well as a series of micro-events and performances by invited participants. Galleries R Us was both a social experiment in gallery-making and a functioning gallery that offered audiences a chance to engage with bite-sized chunks of contemporary art as part of their day-to-day lives. The gallery programme was publicised in advance but the audience was mainly drawn from curious passers-by. A central, highly visible figure – ‘Red’ – acted as the host, minder and public information point.
Galleries R Us was developed in response to the diminishing arts infrastructure in Exeter, specifically the loss of institutions dedicated to the teaching, production and presentation of contemporary art. Because the gallery was modular, and each member of PSU wore/carried part of it, the more of them met, the bigger the gallery could be. With no power supply, no hanging system, no weather protection, no real budget and no guarantee of an audience, Galleries R Us was a challenging space to programme and to work in. All the same, formal gallery procedures such as an official open call-out, selection process, documentation and curatorial support were followed. Although they invited artists (ie anyone who identified as such) to work with limited physical resources and within very limited timescales, Preston Street Union did not wish to limit what was considered possible.
A few minutes before each residency or event was due to start, the guest artist would meet in a designated public space with Red. Shortly after, the PSU associates making up different parts of the gallery would emerge from the crowd and surround the artist and the site of the work. Joining together, they would watch the work impassively for exactly five minutes, before dispersing again and leaving the artist and their work alone with Red. Red handed out information and chatted informally with interested members of the public, many of whom were curious about what they had witnessed. A theme of precarious architectures – and of building and dismantling – emerged both from the works presented and the formation and dispersion of the gallery itself.
Events ranged from Lucia Harley’s intense five-minute performance 'Up Down', delivered to drivers on a break at Exeter Bus Station, to Pete Kingston’s 'Marshmallow Towers', a fast-moving participatory activity investigating the limits of materials and the usefulness of failure. Laura Hopes set the gallery on the move as a marching, drumming army in 'Surrender' and Nick Davies presented a sound and text work 'Reaching Out To Icarus (Architects)' at a noisy building site. Other events included Daniel Cray’s 'Covert Karaoke' and Tim King’s spoken-word performance 'The Big Pig'. Preston Street Union’s own 'Group Show' at the quayside was attended by two older ladies who carefully inspected every single piece of work, each of which was held in its maker’s hands.
“We learnt that simply turning up and doing something in the public realm is a useful way to engage with a genuinely new non-gallery audience/participants who don’t necessarily need to be approached in advance.”
“You literally created a framework/platform which generated new ways to explore, make and engage with art. Brilliant! It’s been an exciting project to be part of and I think you should take your gallery to other towns and communities. It’s just what’s needed right now.”
